In reality, Time accounts neither for good nor for evil, neither for the end nor yet for the beginning of any single work.
And the same is true respecting any chain, however long, made up of antecedents and consequents, however numerous. We see in them movements propagating movements; but then we are obliged to ask, what moved the first of them? The reader may remember Professor Huxley's picture of a cosmic vapour, from a knowledge of which a sufficient Intelligence might have predicted our present world. Looking further, we find this cosmic vapour to be composed (as he says) of molecules possessing forces or properties; in other words, what he really described was a potential Universe; not a Cause, but an already caused production. What, then, caused it?
It was not the Professor's business,—nor is it the business of any Physiologist or of any Physicist, to explain what lies beyond the territories of his science. Consequently he does not account for the existence of this "primitive nebulosity." The "sufficient Intelligence" is only spoken of a possible interpreter or prophet. And Professor Huxley is right and wise in his reticence.
Professor Tyndall is equally wise and right in telling us that "Science knows much of this intermediate phase of things that we call nature, of which it is the product; but science knows nothing of the origin or destiny of nature."[214]
There is always a rightness and wisdom in stating a limit, and an issue, distinctly. No one endowed with clearness of vision, will think the Universe as likely to be adequately accounted for by an eternal nebula, as by an eternity of Mind. No one will exactly state to himself, the meaning of such words as Chance, Time, Law, and others of a like description; and, with those meanings in remembrance, pronounce that any or all of them can explain the origin of anything. But by popular lecturers and article-makers, immeasurable series of conditions are sometimes mentioned in a manner which almost implies that, because immeasurable, the speaker or writer supposes that such conditions may possibly be creative.
Any reader of current literature will scarcely need reminding, that most modern savants usually acquiesce in, and feel burdened by, a sense of "the Inscrutable." And therefore, when summing up the results of scientific truth, they honestly and consistently reduce their disciples to an alternative,—an alternative of which no disciple of any special science ought reasonably to complain. Choose, they tell him, between confessing, "here is the Incomprehensible—here I rest;" or, if you please, endeavouring to "find other means of knowledge, which we do not pretend to furnish." This is no more than to say, and say fairly, "Be satisfied with such information as we can give,—or, if you please, inquire elsewhere." And this seems reasonable; for who would assert that a Professor of Poetry ought to give competent instruction in the Calculus?
We may assume that every student of Natural Theology has made up his mind to "inquire elsewhere." And it is the part of an earnest man so to do. Were not the Future linked to the Present, we all might feel less earnest, less persevering, less anxious for inquiry. Yet, if there be a Future beyond our Present, we at once perceive a weight of reason beyond all powers of estimate, why such a connecting chain must certainly exist. All our experience, every argument from analogy, and all morality, fall into one and the same scale. But of this, more hereafter. There is no doubt that our wisdom and our duty coincide with our natural instincts, in bringing us to this resolution. We may not be able to learn all we could wish of that Future which follows our present; but what we can truly learn is to us a treasure beyond price. Let us, therefore, proceed as fellow-pilgrims in the search.
It is an undeniable fact—one amongst the hard and actual facts which life teaches—that, in the whole of our experience, we never know of more than one kind of cause,—a cause, that is, in the true sense of originating any event or series of events. Nothing can be more certain as respects our knowledge of the material world. From this point of view, Sir J. Herschel describes Brown's book on "Cause and Effect" as "a work of great acuteness and subtlety of reasoning on some points, but in which the whole train of argument is vitiated by one enormous oversight; the omission, namely, of a distinct and immediate personal consciousness of causation in his enumeration of that sequence of events, by which the volition of the mind is made to terminate in the motion of material objects. I mean the consciousness of effort, accompanied with intention thereby to accomplish an end, as a thing entirely distinct from mere desire or volition on the one hand, and from mere spasmodic contraction of muscles on the other."[215]
This causation we experience continually. A heavy stone falls from a wall, and kills a man. No one threw it. We say it fell—or, as a physicist might express it, obeyed the law of gravitation. But we may remember that from the tower of Thebez "a certain woman cast a piece of a millstone upon Abimelech's head and all to break his scull." We form quite a different opinion of this event. We say, here is a case in which "the volition of the mind is made to terminate in the motion of a material object." Some might accuse, others excuse, the woman of Thebez; but all would argue that she caused the death of Abimelech.
Your boy wants to beat a chair which has fallen upon him; you tell him why he must not, and all you say is sound philosophy. He also wants to kill his cat for devouring his canary bird; and again you philosophize correctly. But, suppose your young philosopher for his own pleasure wrings his canary bird's neck? The chair fell by mechanical law—the cat obeyed the law of her hungry instinct—but your boy is culpable. He was the true cause of his own cruel act,—in a word he was responsible. And this same truth of Causation, involved in Responsibility, and constituting one of its necessary factors, is like Mind in Mr. Mill,—a truth which we must accept—inexplicable, but unquestionably real. We know that Will is a Cause,—and we do not actually know of any other cause in the wide Universe. The fact comes home to us in a variety of ways. Was Thurtell the cause or the physical antecedent of Weare's death? If not the cause, we ought never to think him, or any murderer, slaver, torturer, or tyrant, at all in the wrong; neither can we hold them in any manner responsible.